A Monster's Notes

"Submit to whatever spell ... is being cast," the late John Updike advised book reviewers. In the case of acclaimed poet Laurie Sheck's first prose work, that means slowing - way - down, and embracing the work's central conceit: Suppose (as the book's publicity notes suggest) Mary Shelley "had not invented Frankenstein's monster at all, but had met him when she was a girl of eight sitting by her mother's grave, and he came to her unbidden? ... What if he were still alive in the twenty-first century?"

In fact, he has recently left a manuscript in an abandoned New York building - a diary interleaving elaborate fantasy and speculation (as fictional journal entries, letters and visions) about the lives closest to him at the time of his making: Shelley's half sister Claire, the poet Percy Shelley and Henry Clerval, an early friend to the monster's creator, Victor Frankenstein. Later, in what reads like an appended gloss on events of prior pages, the monster contemplates more contemporaneous personages - scientists, musicians, artists - and finally, loops back to letters from Mary Shelley herself, in which she confesses the childhood event she kept secret from all.

It's a whopping what-if, stretching a whopping 500 pages. Afterward, Sheck provides a list of historic corroborations, or prompts, for the fictional liberties she took. Scholars may find this a banquet. But it may better serve the rest of us to read "A Monster's Notes" as a kind of artist's almanac.

Friendless, homeless, the nameless monster (whose narrating voice acts as tour guide) wanders outside mortal radar, yearning to understand his origins, his maker's motives, human existence. The You he addresses seems to be the long-gone Victor (who fled after one look into the yellow eyes of his hapless product), while musing alternately upon the Arctic north, where he roams awhile, and upon Claire, Mary's half sister.

Claire lived a terribly lonely life, losing a sister to suicide and a daughter wrenchingly young. Mary, too, endured her children's deaths, as well as Percy Shelley's drowning. In the book's midsection, the monster follows the imagined trajectory of Clerval, who's banished himself to China to translate a long, mysterious text. Its myriad riddles begin to unhinge and consume him. During these labors, Clerval receives a series of almost unbearably poignant letters from a secluded leprosy victim in Italy, and writes many letters back - but never mails them.

The vision? Loss, dislocation, missed gestures, hidden messages, exile (imposed by self or others) - and always, longing for love, friendship, whatever communion may be possible between boundaries of skin, time, distance, sensibility: ergo, the human predicament. These mental states also, of course, describe the artist's predicament, and everyone in this strange, multitiered ghost ship of a book ponders how language and thought delimit (and sometimes betray) self and other. ("Is anyone truly held or known ... within another's mind?" wonders the nameless leper.) Disconnection and isolation bind the bereft monster as well as his human peers across generations, and their combined anguish raises a chorus of unanswerable questions.

"You sent me forth into my self, my body, but that self was made of otherness and strangeness, in darkness and in shame. The experiment I was wasn't mine. I was sent into a foreign country, but that country's inside me, and I never meant to go. ... Should I respect the shame you felt? ... But what might have happened if I'd turned out as you wanted?"

Lovely passages and moments of intricate insight - bordering at times on preciosity - are tucked among these pages. Again, though, the sprawl of the venture demands a fastidious diligence that one recognizes (sadly) belongs more to a prior era, when evenings were long, silent, undisturbed - inviting the scratching pen, the extended dream (if also the eyestrain of reading and writing by lantern or candle). Sheck's passion for language shines: We feel her poet's joy in its limitless mutability, its reverberations. (The word "cold" is perfectly assessed by the monster - a thoughtful, articulate being - as "one clear syllable with its frozen walls.")

Throughout, we also feel the sensuous pleasure of the act of writing itself - as journals open and close, pages are filled, and innumerable, passionate letters appear and dissolve, like imploring faces in a window.